6 ms·

The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers

38 points by Bostonian 4y ago

jleyank 4y ago
I thought the smarts were required to do the material science, chip design, and factory automation involved in fabs. Once this is done, it’s just clean room and careful repetition. Overly bright people are potentially damaging for manufacturing as they might get bored thinking big thoughts. And how many chip designers are actually needed? Cost of workers, cost of manufacturing, regulatory and governmental overhead…. These influence fans more than smarts.
- jleyank 4y ago
  [flagged]
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  From the outside, chip design looks a lot like writing software. So that's loosely equivalent to asking how many software engineers are actually needed. Credible chance regulation and overhead influence software more than intellect does. I'd certainly believe that as a premise.
version_five 4y ago
Are people able to read this? I'm getting a 403 error
- jjgreen 4y ago
  You're not missing much, a bit thin ...
mjfl 4y ago
Semiconductors are a low margin business. There's a reason why it's not in the USA anymore, even though it started in the USA, and it's not the lack of smart people - the profits were competed away. Now the profits are in design - NVIDIA, AMD, Apple etc. Edit: this is not to say that the USA should not develop its own semiconductor industry again - the issue there isn't profit, it's supply chain and security, prevention of backdooring or denial by China.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  I was under the impression that TSMC are very profitable and Intel used to be. It has really strong winner take all dynamics.
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    Very profitable with what margins? You can make a lot of money with a 1% margin on $50 billion in revenue.
    - JonChesterfield 4y ago
      I don't know offhand. Google reckons 42% "net profit margin", but for an industry which leans hard on reinvesting to stay ahead of the competition 'profit' is quite flexible.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fairity 4y ago
Some people who don't identify as "high IQ" might get offended by this article, but I think the primary argument is valid. Many of our brightest and most ambitious minds go into finance & consulting simply because it pays the most. If we want more innovation & progress in certain fields, the financial incentives need to be aligned. In the case of semiconductors, I'm guessing there needs to be some sort of government funding due to huge startup costs and marketplace dynamics.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  What did the brightest and least ambitious do?
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    Built a shack in the woods and raised dogs.
  - fairity 4y ago
    At my alma mater (MIT), the bright and lazy people actually went into finance also. Not sure what it's like now, but 10 years ago, many hedge funds basically just gave IQ tests as their interview.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Who’s to say finance and consulting aren’t creating the most value?
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    have you seen the state of the world lately?
    - throwaway5959 4y ago
      Nah I live in a carefully crafted bubble in west LA. Rest of the world kind of sucks when I leave it.
  - 4y ago
h2odragon 4y ago
If you're bright enough to be useful where there's this shortage, you're bright enough to see how much those jobs suck. "We need more suckers willing to do incredible hard things for little reward beyond the work of doing them. while the management and their consultants reap millions in ongoing profits for bringing a diluted, not-quite-good-enough version of that work to market" edit to add: These jobs are often at places founded by "genius motivated by love", but now its the second generation or more on from that. the management wants that kind of success but they want it on their schedule (gotta make the quarterlies). they want it without the risk of failure and need for multiple attempts and extended effort, which made the original company work as much as the genius, but no one recalls that part now. they want meetings and reports and rigidly regulated routines more than they actually want the genius level output.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ablatt89 4y ago
  Higher ups from these companies complain about lack of "high IQ" talent yet don't want to budge on offering competitive salaries. I have a smart friend who worked for ASML as a contractor, and they would give him empty promises of bringing him on full time, as if he still needed to prove himself despite being over qualified. Complete clownshow from these upper managers. If workers aren't entitled to a job, you're not entitled to high IQ talent, dumbasses!
- homeland221 4y ago
  Just to highlight Singapore government pays millions to high IQ talent to be government ministers. Singapore Prime Minister for example draw about 2-3mil USD range a year in salary and can code sudoku in c++. Many of the civil servants are scholars and have PhDs.
jmartrican 4y ago
Maybe there is such a thing as combined IQ of groups. That working together can achieve better results.
vsskanth 4y ago
> More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ. I'm not convinced high intelligence is a necessary condition to get into chip design. You just need to be willing to spend the time to finish advanced degrees in university and get trained. This is mostly taken up by foreign students because citizens can earn well becoming an SWE right after bachelor's.
- Sevii 4y ago
  He's not saying anything about chip design. His post is based on the assumption that to get the error rate low enough for chip manufacturing they require high iq line workers which are in short supply.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Even if we assume it is, the reason is as you said, lack of incentives to even get on that path. And their below average IQ manager making much more /s
CoolGuySteve 4y ago
IQs are normalized by country. For example, Canadians are culturally similar enough to take the US test (including some US-specific general knowledge questions and mathematical notation) but score higher on average due to a variety of social factors. The score is then adjusted downwards so that the median Canadian IQ is set at 100.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >For example, Canadians are culturally similar enough to take the US test (including some US-specific general knowledge questions Any IQ test with any sort of validity will not contain any country-specific questions. ("Regatta" became irrelevant as a "gotcha" for those questioning the validity of IQ tests so long ago that it's long since become an emeritus member of same, really.) > and mathematical notation) but score higher on average due to a variety of social factors. I am not aware of any evidence that Canadians score higher than Americans on IQ tests when normalized by audience. Americans do quite well on PISA, for example, compared to their ethnic relatives <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans. Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.
bitwize 4y ago
It's ok. AI is evolving at such a clip that in about 10 years Amazon and Microsoft will be offering IQaaS.
version_five 4y ago
https://archive.md/SsCsF https://archive.md/SsCsF This was satire right? Am I missing the joke? He's just using the definition of IQ and a normal distribution to come up with some number...
naveen99 4y ago
High iq is defined as some standard deviations above average. a definition can’t be a shortage. if you define something to be 2 in a 100, than you don’t get to say 2 in a 100 is a shortage.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  There's a shortage of 2-in-a-hundreds that I can hire (because people like that don't hit the street all that often). There's even more of a shortage that I can hire at the cost I'm willing to pay, which is what I think the real (unstated) issue is. But yeah, that's just like everything. There's a shortage of luxury vacation rentals that fit my budget, too. There's a shortage of fine steak at McDonald's prices. If you want these people, you have to pay them the way they're accustomed to be paying (most of them are smart enough to know their value), and you have to give them something to do that they actually want to work on. Won't do one or both of those, and now you're complaining about a shortage? It's hard to be you, I guess, but nobody else cares. (Note: "You", above, does not mean the parent. It means the would-be employer.)
- yucky 4y ago
  There is a difference between people with high IQ's (the full set) and High IQ workers (a variable subset of those).
bsder 4y ago
"Sophisticated" workers are staying out of semiconductors because it's an industrial job. As such, all semiconductor jobs suck relative to the same job anywhere else. Any software jobs in semiconductors pay far less than software elsewhere. Hardware jobs require you to be on site continuously often with weird hours--generally in places that you probably don't want to be living at. I can go on and on. But anybody I knew of who could leave semiconductors did so and never looked back.
- ilyt 4y ago
  That kinda explains why drivers from hardware companies suck so fucking bad (at least in ARM bubble). Talent just goes elsewhere
eli_gottlieb 4y ago
If there's an "extreme shortage", how much will MR pay me to walk around having a high IQ?
torstenvl 4y ago
> The labor force is approximately 164 million people which sounds like a lot but half of the people in the labor force have IQs below 100. I wish people would stop making claims that mathematically cannot be true in normal distributions.
- torben-friis 4y ago
  What is wrong about the statement? (Besides being useless trivia I mean). Isn’t 100 defined as the center of the bell curve? Honest question.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    I believe OP is saying “at or below” would be more accurate - the current wording completely misses those at the median (which in a normal distribution is the largest single group within the set with a shared result).
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  Maybe my IQ is too low to understand this, but isn't IQ derived from a presumed normal distribution, which is symmetric about the mean, and therefore contains a set of 50% the population that is below the mean? Or by "making claims" do you mean the claims of the premise of an IQ test? That is, it's ludicrous to assume that "actual intelligence" (whatever is being approximated by IQ tests) would fit perfectly into a normal distribution, and it's therefore ludicrous to claim IQ can measure intelligence?
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    For the statement to be true, there would have to be zero people with a median IQ, i.e., not a normal distribution but a sharply bimodal distribution. Analogy: The median U.S. male height is 5'9". Approximately 15% of the male population is 5'9". How can you have 50% of the population <= 5'8", 50% of the population >= 5'10", and 15% of the population == 5'9"? (This isn't a mathematical constraint on the truth of the statement, but... its truth would also depend on there being zero correlation between being low-IQ and lack of labor force participation, which I find implausible.)
fan_of_yoinked 4y ago
"Lord, will you destroy a 330MM person economy for the lack of of 60k Righteous High-IQ Workers?" I think maybe it's a parody, but if nothing else I'm not seeing any justification for a specific number of high iq individuals needed to maintain anything, much less a society or industry. An assumption that intelligent people must be necessary to run something complex, while perhaps reasonable, still doesn't imply anything about the proportions or how that happens. How would we know the organizational structure or incentives wouldn't determine things more than some fractional difference in number?
ajross 4y ago
This is Intel erasure. OK, fine, they're a step behind the process leader for a sustained period for the first time in a few decades. But... "we can't make semiconductors in the US" ... ? Wat?
Sevii 4y ago
It is weird that software engineering (especially cloud and web) pay very highly while other highly skilled jobs like hardware programming typically pay much less. My suspicion is that its related to capital requirements. A web dev has extremely low capital costs related to his work product. He can walk out of the job and be running again on a $500 laptop. A hardware engineer is restricted by the fact that his work product is reliant on combination with large manufacturing orders. He can't fund a order for 1000s of IC units himself. Because of this we see a lot more talent shift into the software world while other areas stagnate.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  So as soon as we have matter replicators or something similar (3D printers are the start of this I guess), then hardware professions will pay more?
throwaway0asd 4y ago
One major inhibitor (perhaps the most major inhibitor) of high IQ people is social repression. For example you cannot get a better software job merely by having a higher IQ. You have to find the right opportunity specifically looking for a high IQ person. Doing so greatly reduces odds of candidate selection for both the candidate and prospective employer.
vgel 4y ago
> More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ. The entire article is predicated on this asspull. Where's the evidence? Has someone done a study on the average IQ of TSMC workers? This assumes so many things: 1) That semiconductor manufacturing is more complex than manufacturing commonly done in the US. We make rockets! Complex pharmaceuticals! Nuclear weapons! What's the complexity factor of semiconductor manufacturing to those processes? 1.1x? 2x? 100?? 1000x??? 2) That just because the manufacturing process is more complex, the skill of a line worker in that process must be higher than a line worker in a simpler industry. Maybe ASML makes very user-friendly machines? Again, it's possibly true, but it's just asserted as ground truth with no evidence. 3) That the higher skill required of workers must correlate 1:1 (or roughly so) with IQ. "A single speck of dust"--that sounds like workers must be detail-oriented and follow processes to the letter, and any veering off that path would have disastrous consequences. Does that sound like an environment where Feynman or Einstein or Curie would thrive just because they had "high IQ"? And instead of justifying the central leap of logic the entire article is premised on, the author instead spends their time on such insights as "half the American population is below 100 IQ"...
marcell 4y ago
This is a weird article. He's saying we can't do semiconductor manufacturing in US because we don't have enough high IQ people to work in the factory. Is this actually the case? Designing the chips is a high IQ task, but why would you need brainiacs in the factory? Versus someone really good at following instructions.
Dudelander 4y ago
Lot of assumptions here: 1) "High" IQ is necessary to make semi-conductors? Why, because of low tolerances? In that case it just needs people who are really careful. 2) IQ is universal. This is not the case - a 100 IQ is set to be the middle of the curve - so a 100 IQ today would be a 120 IQ 30 years ago. (Flynn effect) 3) IQ is static. This is also not the case. Anyone can improve their IQ. If you really want a high IQ, practice taking IQ tests. An Air Force officer managed to get his IQ up to 185 because it was his job to administer IQ tests. Education has also been shown to increase IQ. 4) IQ is a useful metric. There is some evidence to suggest that it relates to improved academic performance, but a lot of the early science was based on bad data.

38 points by Bostonian 4y ago

I thought the smarts were required to do the material science, chip design, and factory automation involved in fabs. Once this is done, it’s just clean room and careful repetition. Overly bright people are potentially damaging for manufacturing as they might get bored thinking big thoughts. And how many chip designers are actually needed? Cost of workers, cost of manufacturing, regulatory and governmental overhead…. These influence fans more than smarts.

jleyank 4y ago
[flagged]
JonChesterfield 4y ago
From the outside, chip design looks a lot like writing software. So that's loosely equivalent to asking how many software engineers are actually needed. Credible chance regulation and overhead influence software more than intellect does. I'd certainly believe that as a premise.

version_five 4y ago

Are people able to read this? I'm getting a 403 error

jjgreen 4y ago
You're not missing much, a bit thin ...

mjfl 4y ago

Semiconductors are a low margin business. There's a reason why it's not in the USA anymore, even though it started in the USA, and it's not the lack of smart people - the profits were competed away. Now the profits are in design - NVIDIA, AMD, Apple etc. Edit: this is not to say that the USA should not develop its own semiconductor industry again - the issue there isn't profit, it's supply chain and security, prevention of backdooring or denial by China.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
I was under the impression that TSMC are very profitable and Intel used to be. It has really strong winner take all dynamics.
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Very profitable with what margins? You can make a lot of money with a 1% margin on $50 billion in revenue.
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago
    I don't know offhand. Google reckons 42% "net profit margin", but for an industry which leans hard on reinvesting to stay ahead of the competition 'profit' is quite flexible.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fairity 4y ago

Some people who don't identify as "high IQ" might get offended by this article, but I think the primary argument is valid. Many of our brightest and most ambitious minds go into finance & consulting simply because it pays the most. If we want more innovation & progress in certain fields, the financial incentives need to be aligned. In the case of semiconductors, I'm guessing there needs to be some sort of government funding due to huge startup costs and marketplace dynamics.

hotpotamus 4y ago
What did the brightest and least ambitious do?
- h2odragon 4y ago
  Built a shack in the woods and raised dogs.
- fairity 4y ago
  At my alma mater (MIT), the bright and lazy people actually went into finance also. Not sure what it's like now, but 10 years ago, many hedge funds basically just gave IQ tests as their interview.
throwaway5959 4y ago
Who’s to say finance and consulting aren’t creating the most value?
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  have you seen the state of the world lately?
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    Nah I live in a carefully crafted bubble in west LA. Rest of the world kind of sucks when I leave it.
- 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago

If you're bright enough to be useful where there's this shortage, you're bright enough to see how much those jobs suck. "We need more suckers willing to do incredible hard things for little reward beyond the work of doing them. while the management and their consultants reap millions in ongoing profits for bringing a diluted, not-quite-good-enough version of that work to market" edit to add: These jobs are often at places founded by "genius motivated by love", but now its the second generation or more on from that. the management wants that kind of success but they want it on their schedule (gotta make the quarterlies). they want it without the risk of failure and need for multiple attempts and extended effort, which made the original company work as much as the genius, but no one recalls that part now. they want meetings and reports and rigidly regulated routines more than they actually want the genius level output.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ablatt89 4y ago
Higher ups from these companies complain about lack of "high IQ" talent yet don't want to budge on offering competitive salaries. I have a smart friend who worked for ASML as a contractor, and they would give him empty promises of bringing him on full time, as if he still needed to prove himself despite being over qualified. Complete clownshow from these upper managers. If workers aren't entitled to a job, you're not entitled to high IQ talent, dumbasses!
homeland221 4y ago
Just to highlight Singapore government pays millions to high IQ talent to be government ministers. Singapore Prime Minister for example draw about 2-3mil USD range a year in salary and can code sudoku in c++. Many of the civil servants are scholars and have PhDs.

jmartrican 4y ago

Maybe there is such a thing as combined IQ of groups. That working together can achieve better results.

vsskanth 4y ago

> More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ. I'm not convinced high intelligence is a necessary condition to get into chip design. You just need to be willing to spend the time to finish advanced degrees in university and get trained. This is mostly taken up by foreign students because citizens can earn well becoming an SWE right after bachelor's.

Sevii 4y ago
He's not saying anything about chip design. His post is based on the assumption that to get the error rate low enough for chip manufacturing they require high iq line workers which are in short supply.
ilyt 4y ago
Even if we assume it is, the reason is as you said, lack of incentives to even get on that path. And their below average IQ manager making much more /s

CoolGuySteve 4y ago

IQs are normalized by country. For example, Canadians are culturally similar enough to take the US test (including some US-specific general knowledge questions and mathematical notation) but score higher on average due to a variety of social factors. The score is then adjusted downwards so that the median Canadian IQ is set at 100.

TMWNN 4y ago
>For example, Canadians are culturally similar enough to take the US test (including some US-specific general knowledge questions Any IQ test with any sort of validity will not contain any country-specific questions. ("Regatta" became irrelevant as a "gotcha" for those questioning the validity of IQ tests so long ago that it's long since become an emeritus member of same, really.) > and mathematical notation) but score higher on average due to a variety of social factors. I am not aware of any evidence that Canadians score higher than Americans on IQ tests when normalized by audience. Americans do quite well on PISA, for example, compared to their ethnic relatives <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans. Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

bitwize 4y ago

It's ok. AI is evolving at such a clip that in about 10 years Amazon and Microsoft will be offering IQaaS.

version_five 4y ago

https://archive.md/SsCsF https://archive.md/SsCsF This was satire right? Am I missing the joke? He's just using the definition of IQ and a normal distribution to come up with some number...

naveen99 4y ago

High iq is defined as some standard deviations above average. a definition can’t be a shortage. if you define something to be 2 in a 100, than you don’t get to say 2 in a 100 is a shortage.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
There's a shortage of 2-in-a-hundreds that I can hire (because people like that don't hit the street all that often). There's even more of a shortage that I can hire at the cost I'm willing to pay, which is what I think the real (unstated) issue is. But yeah, that's just like everything. There's a shortage of luxury vacation rentals that fit my budget, too. There's a shortage of fine steak at McDonald's prices. If you want these people, you have to pay them the way they're accustomed to be paying (most of them are smart enough to know their value), and you have to give them something to do that they actually want to work on. Won't do one or both of those, and now you're complaining about a shortage? It's hard to be you, I guess, but nobody else cares. (Note: "You", above, does not mean the parent. It means the would-be employer.)
yucky 4y ago
There is a difference between people with high IQ's (the full set) and High IQ workers (a variable subset of those).

bsder 4y ago

"Sophisticated" workers are staying out of semiconductors because it's an industrial job. As such, all semiconductor jobs suck relative to the same job anywhere else. Any software jobs in semiconductors pay far less than software elsewhere. Hardware jobs require you to be on site continuously often with weird hours--generally in places that you probably don't want to be living at. I can go on and on. But anybody I knew of who could leave semiconductors did so and never looked back.

ilyt 4y ago
That kinda explains why drivers from hardware companies suck so fucking bad (at least in ARM bubble). Talent just goes elsewhere

eli_gottlieb 4y ago

If there's an "extreme shortage", how much will MR pay me to walk around having a high IQ?

torstenvl 4y ago

> The labor force is approximately 164 million people which sounds like a lot but half of the people in the labor force have IQs below 100. I wish people would stop making claims that mathematically cannot be true in normal distributions.

torben-friis 4y ago
What is wrong about the statement? (Besides being useless trivia I mean). Isn’t 100 defined as the center of the bell curve? Honest question.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  I believe OP is saying “at or below” would be more accurate - the current wording completely misses those at the median (which in a normal distribution is the largest single group within the set with a shared result).
TechBro8615 4y ago
Maybe my IQ is too low to understand this, but isn't IQ derived from a presumed normal distribution, which is symmetric about the mean, and therefore contains a set of 50% the population that is below the mean? Or by "making claims" do you mean the claims of the premise of an IQ test? That is, it's ludicrous to assume that "actual intelligence" (whatever is being approximated by IQ tests) would fit perfectly into a normal distribution, and it's therefore ludicrous to claim IQ can measure intelligence?
- torstenvl 4y ago
  For the statement to be true, there would have to be zero people with a median IQ, i.e., not a normal distribution but a sharply bimodal distribution. Analogy: The median U.S. male height is 5'9". Approximately 15% of the male population is 5'9". How can you have 50% of the population <= 5'8", 50% of the population >= 5'10", and 15% of the population == 5'9"? (This isn't a mathematical constraint on the truth of the statement, but... its truth would also depend on there being zero correlation between being low-IQ and lack of labor force participation, which I find implausible.)

fan_of_yoinked 4y ago

"Lord, will you destroy a 330MM person economy for the lack of of 60k Righteous High-IQ Workers?" I think maybe it's a parody, but if nothing else I'm not seeing any justification for a specific number of high iq individuals needed to maintain anything, much less a society or industry. An assumption that intelligent people must be necessary to run something complex, while perhaps reasonable, still doesn't imply anything about the proportions or how that happens. How would we know the organizational structure or incentives wouldn't determine things more than some fractional difference in number?

ajross 4y ago

This is Intel erasure. OK, fine, they're a step behind the process leader for a sustained period for the first time in a few decades. But... "we can't make semiconductors in the US" ... ? Wat?

Sevii 4y ago

It is weird that software engineering (especially cloud and web) pay very highly while other highly skilled jobs like hardware programming typically pay much less. My suspicion is that its related to capital requirements. A web dev has extremely low capital costs related to his work product. He can walk out of the job and be running again on a $500 laptop. A hardware engineer is restricted by the fact that his work product is reliant on combination with large manufacturing orders. He can't fund a order for 1000s of IC units himself. Because of this we see a lot more talent shift into the software world while other areas stagnate.

midoridensha 4y ago
So as soon as we have matter replicators or something similar (3D printers are the start of this I guess), then hardware professions will pay more?

throwaway0asd 4y ago

One major inhibitor (perhaps the most major inhibitor) of high IQ people is social repression. For example you cannot get a better software job merely by having a higher IQ. You have to find the right opportunity specifically looking for a high IQ person. Doing so greatly reduces odds of candidate selection for both the candidate and prospective employer.

vgel 4y ago

> More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ. The entire article is predicated on this asspull. Where's the evidence? Has someone done a study on the average IQ of TSMC workers? This assumes so many things: 1) That semiconductor manufacturing is more complex than manufacturing commonly done in the US. We make rockets! Complex pharmaceuticals! Nuclear weapons! What's the complexity factor of semiconductor manufacturing to those processes? 1.1x? 2x? 100?? 1000x??? 2) That just because the manufacturing process is more complex, the skill of a line worker in that process must be higher than a line worker in a simpler industry. Maybe ASML makes very user-friendly machines? Again, it's possibly true, but it's just asserted as ground truth with no evidence. 3) That the higher skill required of workers must correlate 1:1 (or roughly so) with IQ. "A single speck of dust"--that sounds like workers must be detail-oriented and follow processes to the letter, and any veering off that path would have disastrous consequences. Does that sound like an environment where Feynman or Einstein or Curie would thrive just because they had "high IQ"? And instead of justifying the central leap of logic the entire article is premised on, the author instead spends their time on such insights as "half the American population is below 100 IQ"...

marcell 4y ago

This is a weird article. He's saying we can't do semiconductor manufacturing in US because we don't have enough high IQ people to work in the factory. Is this actually the case? Designing the chips is a high IQ task, but why would you need brainiacs in the factory? Versus someone really good at following instructions.

Dudelander 4y ago

Lot of assumptions here: 1) "High" IQ is necessary to make semi-conductors? Why, because of low tolerances? In that case it just needs people who are really careful. 2) IQ is universal. This is not the case - a 100 IQ is set to be the middle of the curve - so a 100 IQ today would be a 120 IQ 30 years ago. (Flynn effect) 3) IQ is static. This is also not the case. Anyone can improve their IQ. If you really want a high IQ, practice taking IQ tests. An Air Force officer managed to get his IQ up to 185 because it was his job to administer IQ tests. Education has also been shown to increase IQ. 4) IQ is a useful metric. There is some evidence to suggest that it relates to improved academic performance, but a lot of the early science was based on bad data.